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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26837245">Lourdes</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/tanghereen/pseuds/tanghereen'>tanghereen</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The X-Files</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Reconnaissance, The X-Files Pilot</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 12:22:01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,240</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26837245</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/tanghereen/pseuds/tanghereen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>a candid recollection from an onlooker of higher proportions .</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Fox Mulder/Dana Scully</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>The X-Files Love Month</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Lourdes</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
    A thinner face and body, sad eyes and a quiet collected composure gave her a delicate appearance that can only have been attractive to any man looking for a presentable intellectual companion. As Agent Dana Scully descended down the staircase to the basement office, she had a multitude of nervous energy expressing itself as a constant flick of the tendril of thread floating around her skirt. When she approached the desk to introduce herself, she found herself an arm's length from the infamous Agent Fox Mulder. He was tall with auburn hair; the large limpid eyes gave him a dreamer's self-absorbed look. She thought of him as a young man, though he neither looked nor indeed was young; he was 35 years old. A rapport between the two of them immediately sprang up and she summed up the result of that first day's conversation in the formal fashion he would have avoided: 'He expressed the desire to see me again and to continue our conversation of that evening on scientific and social subjects in which he and I were both interested, and on which we seemed to have similar opinions.' Perhaps Mulder was wise enough to realize that his most serious opposition would come not from a government official but from the somewhat defensive and mentally tough young woman herself. He was a psychologist and highly educated: scientific study and education to which she passionately aspired. Like her he was a passive idealist and was interested in the social questions that had once so held her attention but which she had now abandoned for scientific study. Also like her he was shy and introverted: she always felt more secure with people of similar character to her own. A friend of Dana, when she met Fox Mulder for the first time, found his reserve at first intimidating, but noticed it hid a simple desire to please. What expressive dash he had in his character was chiefly put into his work and his written fluency. But he was not so shy as to prevent him persuading Dana to let him inspect her body for deadly bumps, sit on her floor, and talk of his work and his ideals. He had in mind, she soon learned, a single serious role for himself, entirely devoted to truth and the rewards its purity of discovery had to offer. The simplicity of it all appealed to her and he began to influence her thinking. Before that summer was out he was recommending a text on mechanics and a treatise on analysis as well as offering her a copy of Zola's Lourdes; he gently flattered her by telling her that in it she would find opinions on religion that would coincide with her own. Religion had never been part of his education or make up even in childhood. He denied finding any attraction in the idea of fatalism, yet quite out of his rational character, he had quite an interest in superstition and the supernatural. One spring day, soon after they had met, he took her to a mid-Lent country fair in Virginia. They moved through the thick crowd of blue-jacketed workers and wives. He turned from her for a few seconds, then looked back down at her. She was gone: swept on and away by the crowd. It took him several minutes to find her again. The memory of the incident worried him and he was later to remind her of it: 'It seems to me that our relationship will suddenly be interrupted like this without either one of us wishing it. I am not a fatalist but this will probably be a consequence of our characters. I shall never know how to act at the right moment.' It was a strange remark to make at this stage of their acquaintance. She was interested deeply in what he did, and she was beginning to be equally interested in what he was. His father had also worked for the FBI and sent him to Oxford University, but he seemed to have a missing piece inside of him that no amount of educational rearing could replace.She learned later that his sister was abducted directly front of him when he was fourteen years old. The melancholy she felt from him was explained by this sad fact. But she never lost interest in the stimuli ad events that created Fox Mulder. While exploring a crime scene, his conceptual sense made it possible for him to exercise and to express complex situations in simple rational terms. This could only have been developed in a man with highly developed contemplative abilities. These he had in abundance; his peers described him more simply as a dreamer. Much of his time in the office basement with Scully was spent on the work he loved best, that which most easily suited his solitary, introspective nature, and most most fruitful use of his conceptual abilities. Her presence equalized the right and left brain imbalance of their methods, and although the partners didn't always see eye-to-eye, he was grateful for her exceptional grasp on logic; in fact, she saved him from himself by means of pure coincidence.

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"We have promised ourselves to have a great friendship, one for the other. If only you won't change your mind! No promises are binding and these are the things you can't command. It would be a wonderful thing, however, and this I wouldn't dare hope for, to pass our stay the FBI close to each other hypnotized in our dreams; your patriotic dream, our humanitarian dream, and our scientific dream."
	* Fox Mulder, May 3rd, 1991

"Of all these dreams it's the last one that I believe to be legitimate. I mean by that, that we are powerless to change the social state, and even if not, we should not know what to do; in taking action of any sort we could never be sure that we were doing more harm than good by slowing down some inevitable evolution. On the contrary, from the scientific point of view we could hope to do something; the ground is more solid here and all discoveries, no matter how small, remain once they have been acquired."
	* Dana Scully, May 5th, 1991

"I don't know why I've taken it into my head to keep you in the basement, and to exile you from your prospective career in medicine and family ties without having anything to offer you in exchange for the sacrifice. I find that you are a little misleading when you say you are perfectly free. We are all of us more or less slaves of our affections, slaves of the prejudices of those we love. We also have to earn our living and because of that, cogs in the never-ending machine. The most painful things are the concessions we have to make to the prejudices of the society around us where, more or less often, we don't make them according to our weakness or strength. If we don't make enough of them we are crushed; if we make too many we become vile and disgusted with ourselves. Here I am, far from the principles I used to have ten years ago. I believed then that I had to do everything in excess and never make a single concession to the environment. I believed I had to exaggerate defects as well as good qualities. But I was wrong."
	* Fox Mulder, May 7th, 1991

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